Michael Seitzman sums up the Mad Biologist’s philosophy of dealing with creationists, denialists, and other sundry morons:

I have some advice for all of us. Stop trying to get these people to realize how wrong they are and how right you are. Stop trying to apply reason to the profoundly unreasonable. Stop trying to mitigate or explain their collective temper tantrum. Stop trying to curry their favor, their votes, their attention. They don’t care about truth, right and wrong, good or bad. They care about stomping feet, crying victim, and pointing fingers. Barney Frank had it exactly right, it’s like arguing with a dining room table. Enough is enough. Fuck Kumbaya….

Comments

except they have guns and think they have a majority. Some polls suggest they do even. Some of them are liars, certainly. However some are simply deluded. The trick is weaning the deluded from the liars. The liars deserve no civility.

And nothing will encourage the ones that don’t know any better to educate themselves than being met with constant scorn and ridicule. As long as the deluded and ignorant are treated as if their opinion is valid they’ll remain deluded and ignorant.
As an added bonus, scorn and ridicule are a lot of fun.

After facing this reality for years, patiently (sometimes) explaining science or providing links that disprove a loony idea, I find I derive a few moments guilty pleasure laughing at them. I can then go about my day more calmly. This does not completely alleviate the feeling I have that they are dangerous to me, my community, my country, the whole damn world. Laughing helps but I keep looking over my shoulder.

Well, the problem is that there are many uninformed citizens and voters, who then are easily mislead by the entrenched interests, and also easily scared. They know something is wrong, their economic situation endangered; but have no time to figure out what is really the cause of it. And they are also misled by the mainstream media, now branches of major corporations.
The genius of the Republican party since Reagan (or Nixon) was to tell such people that their real enemy is smug liberal ‘elites’ and brown people, and that the Republican party has their interests at heart, (e.g. by reducing taxes, xenophobia) when in fact it is actively redistributing income from the poor and middle class to the rich, gives tax incentives to agribusinesses which devastate rural America, corporations which offshore jobs, and large media concerns (which in the view of some ‘socially conservatives’ undermine traditional morals).

And the ‘liberal elites’ confirm this image (of benevolent Republicans, evil liberals) when reacting with smugness and an expression of moral superiority to the misguided pronouncements of the uninformed. ‘Liberal pundits’ are often falling into this trap (see many posts on the http://www.dailyhowler.com/ ).
It is really difficult to reach the uninformed. The mainstream media have been a total failure on this, even when trying to say something liberal.–
Of course, a forceful response to some ranting -which Seitzmann advocates – is actually useful, so as to make clear that a certain rant is an obvious lie or a talking point by the insurance industry which takes 20+% of your premium dollars to feed their claims-denying administration and multi-million CEO salaries.
But one should try to be humble when doing this. And stress that one is indeed representing the best values of America – mututal help in times of need, Christian charity etc.- when, e.g. pushing for health care.
And clearly it would help if, e.g., the plans for health insurance reform would actually contain progressive measures such as the public option, and these would be actively pushed by Democrats and the White House, rather than being negotiated away (by side agreements with drug industry; in the Senate by agreement with Grassley, who is proud to announce his achievement of preventing reform; ‘Blue’ must mean ‘Insurance Industry Lap-‘, as in Blue Dog Democrat).
It is a never-ending struggle. And it did not end with the election of President Obama or a Democratic Congress.